You are faking agile without real customer collaboration
No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it. — H.E. Luccock
Agile success lies in creating the highest value for the available budget and resources. This does not happen by only adopting agile — a continuous focus and close customer collaboration are vital to achieving this. ‘Customers’ includes project sponsors, product owners, wider stakeholders, and users of the system.
Technical teams have an inherent difficulty in creating real collaboration with their customers. The difference in language and motivational factors between technical and business people can be a barrier. Technical teams are passionate about technical excellence. They want to create new products and features. The business owners focus on business value and end-customer needs. There will be times when these two things might not have a natural alignment.
Real collaboration is more than just talking to customers. It is about creating a common understanding of the complex software development process. Balancing the technical team’s motivational factors, and business owner’s need in order to maximize value. It is coming up with real ideas about product features together. It is about designing a short and effective feedback process.
So how do we engage customers in a meaningful and productive collaborative mindset? Here are 5 ways to create a collaborative environment to achieve the highest value.
Make it easy — Start with explaining agile and continue with coaching
Start the new project with a session on the development process. Ensure that the customers understand the high-level process, its benefits, and constraints. Explain how the development team does things and what the team will need from the customers.
After the initial explanation, continue to coach your customers in agile. You do this with your development team and product owners. Expand this to the wider group. You do not have to make your customers experts in agile. The aim is to create enough understanding so that technical teams and customers can work in a productive way.
Focus on topics that will help customers and the team increase the value of the available budget.
Make them partners
Trust your customers and make them real partners in the project. Highlight the challenges the team faces. Explain the reasons behind technical decisions in layman terms. There will be certain features that are more expensive due to technical reasons. With a clear understanding, customers will be able to make informed decisions as to whether a simplified implementation may suffice or the original requirement still provides business value.
Help your team to see your customer’s perspective. You can play a key role in helping your team understand the business challenges and needs. It will even be better when your customer explains business to the technical team.
Don’t spend time on the technical issues when other simpler solutions are available.
Make it transparent
Your customers should have access to all the aspects of the project all the time. They should know the high-level schedule and the budget burndown versus features delivered. They should be clear on the risks and mitigation strategies. They should have access to the product backlog and the sprint board. Make it easier for your customers to understand all aspects of the project.
This will make it easier for the development team to have meaningful discussions with them, resulting in better value.
Create diverse channels of communication
People have their own preferences of how they communicate. Some people like email, while others favor a chat app. Some people are more comfortable having regular meetings. Create diverse channels of communication. This will help engage your customers in a much more productive way.
The increase in engagement will result in building trust and better products.
Establish a short feedback loop
Scrum has a two-week feedback loop (Sprint Reviews). This is out of date and I have written about this in my blog about the benefits of shorter feedback.
We have found that meeting your customers every two days works quite well. These meetings are short (15 mins) like stand-ups to show progress and get feedback. Create a small end to end feature slice that you can show your customers in these meetings. We even show the feature from the developer computer if it is not complete to get feedback. We have meetings to get feedback on wireframes, UI/UX designs to help make decisions. This saves time and saving time increases the value.
As Henry Ford said — if everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. This is also the key to getting the highest value from available resources and your success with agile.
